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Software developer at a big library, cyclist, photographer, hiker, reader. Email: chris@improbable.org
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“A different theory — one supported by conversations I’ve had with several friends and associates of Mr. Zuckerberg’s in recent months — is that the billionaire’s personal politics have shifted sharply to the right since 2020, and that his embrace of Mr. Trump may stem less from cynical opportunism than real enthusiasm.”
Washington, DC
PHILADELPHIA (January 8, 2025) The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) – a Quaker organization that has worked for peace and justice for over a century – has cancelled planned advertising with the New York Times after the paper refused to allow an ad that referred to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The ad read: "Tell Congress to stop arming Israel's genocide in Gaza now! As a Quaker organization, we work for peace. Join us. Tell the President and Congress to stop the killing and starvation in Gaza.”
“The refusal of The New York Times to run paid digital ads that call for an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza is an outrageous attempt to sidestep the truth,” said Joyce Ajlouny, General Secretary for AFSC. “Palestinians and allies have been silenced and marginalized in the media for decades as these institutions choose silence over accountability. It is only by challenging this reality that we can hope to forge a path toward a more just and equitable world.”
After receiving the text for the ad quoted above, a representative from the advertising team suggested AFSC use the word “war” instead of “genocide” – a word with an entirely different meaning both colloquially and under international law. When AFSC rejected this approach, the New York Times Ad Acceptability Team sent an email that read in part: “Various international bodies, human rights organizations, and governments have differing views on the situation. In line with our commitment to factual accuracy and adherence to legal standards, we must ensure that all advertising content complies with these widely applied definitions.”
Many human rights organizations, legal scholars, genocide and holocaust scholars, and UN bodies have determined that Israel is committing genocide or genocidal acts in Gaza. This includes U.S.-based organizations like the Center for Constitutional Rights and the University Network for Human Rights, international human rights organizations Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and several Palestinian human rights groups. The New York Times regularly looks to several of these organizations as sources for its own reporting.
In January of 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a provisional ruling that Israel’s actions in Gaza were “plausibly genocidal.” The case was brought by South Africa, and now has the support of 14 countries. The same week that the New York Times rejected AFSC’s ad, the Washington Post ran an advertisement from Amnesty International that used the language of genocide.
“The suggestion that the New York Times couldn’t run an ad against Israel’s genocide in Gaza because there are ‘differing views’ is absurd,” said Layne Mullett, Director of Media Relations for AFSC. “The New York Times advertises a wide variety of products and advocacy messages on which there are differing views. Why is it not acceptable to publicize the meticulously documented atrocities committed by Israel and paid for by the United States?”
AFSC has been supporting humanitarian efforts in Gaza since 1948 and currently has staff in Gaza, Ramallah, and Jerusalem. Since October of 2023, AFSC staff in Gaza have provided 1.5 million meals, hygiene kits, and other units of humanitarian aid to internally displaced people. In the U.S., AFSC programs are working to put pressure on the Biden administration and Congress to call for a permanent cease-fire, full humanitarian access, release of all who are held captive, and an end to U.S. military funding for Israel.
“Our courageous staff members in Gaza witness daily horrors and continue to provide vital support despite Israel’s relentless attacks on their homes and families,” said Joyce Ajlouny. “Our ad campaign aims to shed light on these atrocities while urging people in the U.S. to pressure the President and Congress to halt weapons shipments to Israel and advocate for an end to the genocide.”
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The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) promotes a world free of violence, inequality, and oppression. Guided by the Quaker belief in the divine light within each person, we nurture the seeds of change and the respect for human life to fundamentally transform our societies and institutions. We work with people and partners worldwide, of all faiths and backgrounds, to meet urgent community needs, challenge injustice, and build peace.
Welp, looks I might be getting expelled from the University of Washington. As many of you know, last quarter I built an initial version of HuskySwap for a class project. It was a simple app designed to help students find partners to trade spots in critical classes after they filled up. I’m sure other people have pursued this kind of thing before, but there’s no go-to solution at UW and I wanted to contribute something cool for everyone. At first it was a fun project to catch up to the latest versions of .NET and Angular with some practice implementing features around database abstraction, real-time chat, and the full stack challenges associated with things like role-based permissions. I was probably going to build it anyway, so it was great that I could actually get course credit for CSE 403. I was really proud of the MVP and excited that the people I demoed it for actually wanted to use it. So I set aside some time in my winter quarter schedule to start hardening it so I could launch ahead of spring quarter registration. Then I came across the swagger docs for integrating with the registration system. The site says: “The Student Web Service gives your application access to information in the Student database such as course data, registration data, section data, person data, and term data (general academic data).” I got excited because it sounded like they were supportive of scenarios like mine. After all, UW aspires to be top ranked in both CS and business. Of course they would F/foster :P an entrepreneurial spirit! I reached out to request an access token. I wasn’t too ambitious up front; all I wanted was read-only access to automate the course catalog import instead of having to manually enter every class. But if things went well it would be awesome to automate the process further or even find other gaps I could fill to improve the community experience. Several hours later I received an unambiguous response: a “Notice of Violation of Registration Tampering Abuse Policy”. I was instructed to take down my demo site (and its handful of fake demo classes) or else they would begin the process that would culminate with my expulsion. I had originally reached out hoping to make the school experience better for everyone and they immediately went nuclear. I’m not too worried about the threat since taking down the demo site is no big deal. But I’m a little heartbroken to see how the school views me. I thought they’d be excited about what I was pursuing—or at least that I was pursuing anything—but they’d rather have me simply leave. I’m scheduled to graduate in a few months and am eager to move on to projects that don’t need to be cleared with the UW Registrar. If you know of anyone looking for a full-time software engineer with a knack for getting the attention of senior leadership, please send them my way! I can start full-time in June. Link to repo:
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Woooow - a strong contender for Most Abusive Administrator of the year and it’s not even the middle of January!
Washington, DC
Building Ultra Long Range TOSLINK
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 38th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2024
Image description: 13th century illustration of a man desperately showing an open book to a mythical winged beast who is so uninterested it has turned away and stuck its own tail in its ear.
As any novelist will tell you: the hardest part of being an author isn’t writing the book, it’s selling it to readers who are inundated with choice. I’m guessing even Bede—the bestseller of his day—sometimes felt desperate to get the word out about a newly-available book. And I have zero doubt that then, as now—and probably since the advent of the written word, whether on clay tablets, rolls of papyrus, or heavily-illuminated vellum codices—the conversation between author and reader has gone something like this:
- Author: I have a new book! Just out in paperback!
- Reader: Look at this interesting rock…
- Author: I think you’d like it. It’s—
- Reader:
La-la-la - Author: No, really, it’s just your sort of—
- Reader: LA-LA-LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!
The only way to break through the noise is to have serious publicity—a whole team who work on marketing, advertising, interviews, reviews, profiles, feature articles, influencer outreach, product placement, discounts, social media, academic awareness, retail partnerships, podcasts, and too many other things to list. And that all costs not just a lot of time better spent writing, but some real money.
It used to be that if you were with a good publisher and at a certain level they would take care of all that. But there is now so much input streaming around every potential reader from a variety of sources—TV! Doomscrolling! Advertising! World of Warcraft! Podcasts! TikTok! Sports! Spotify! Instagram! Movies! Manga! Mortal Kombat! Facebook! Twitch! Bluesky! Discord! News! Substack! News! More news!—that publishers simply don’t have the resources to break through the noise.
Which brings me to Patreon.
I have books coming out in summer 20251. The peak time for cultivating media coverage is three to four months in advance—which just happens to be during the first 100 days of the new administration. And I don’t have to tell you how little room there will be in the news cycle for anything that isn’t full of political strife and/or sycophancy. Some brand-new, highly-anticipated hardcover releases from celebrities and/or veteran NYT bestsellers will, no doubt, be able to get a column inch here or a 10-minute podcast segment there, but the rest of us? No—no matter how good the books are. So I want to raise enough money to hire independent publicists on both sides of the Atlantic from late spring through autumn 2025, and to retain them through the holiday period if possible.2
But for me the need for publicists is about more than getting attention for specific books.
I’ve written nine novels and most have won awards—many more than one. Why, then, do I still need outside help? Simple: the books were published by different presses and marketed in different genres. So the Aud books are known and loved within the precinct of one walled garden (that is, some of them are—because each of those three in turn were published by different presses, so…); Slow River and Ammonite in another; Hild and Menewood in yet another (and don’t even think about how to describe and market So Lucky, not to mention all my nonfiction…). I need to break down the walls between those literary gardens, to connect the whole ecosystem—to bring readers of my contemporary suspense thrillers to my historical fiction, and readers of my historical fiction to my science fiction, and readers of my science fiction to my rant-and-rage writing, the readers of my rant-and-rage writing to my fantasy, the readers of my fantasy back to Aud—in order to create critical mass, an explosion of awareness. I believe that would please those of my readers who don’t know my other work exists. I know it would please me. And a happy writer is a productive writer—which will please my readers even more. A virtuous cycle!
So: Would you like to help? And in return read a serialisation of a whole, finished—and actually pretty good—unpublished novel?3 Or hear me read those bits of Aud and Hild books that never made it into the final version?4 Or—given the smaller, more private nature of Patreon membership—read some things of an entirely different nature and flavour than posts publicly available here?5 Then my Patreon page is the place for you (and for this first week only, 15% off the posted rates). Do please take some time to read the About page. I’m trying to do something different with the membership tiers—I believe my readers are the kind of people who understand that fairness, real fairness, is more than the simplistic idea that those who pay the same get the same, because we all have different incomes and expenses and needs. I would love to be right.6 (And if you know someone who would love to be able to read these Patreon posts but can’t afford the lowest tier (currently $3, though that, like everything else, may change as I experiment and adjust), then you can give them it as a gift.) Either way, I’m most grateful for your support.
- And another, perhaps in winter 2025/6. Patreon members will, of course, hear about it before anyone else.
︎ - I have, in fact, already been experimenting with publicists—which is why I’ve been getting articles and interviews and reviews lately on both sides of the Atlantic, with more on the way, even a year after the hardcover of Menewood came out. But publicists—good publicists—are expensive. I need your help to continue. ︎
- You can find out more about that on Patreon—on the Polls. I’m putting together a series of polls to gauge reader interest in different text-, audio-, and visually-based options. Trust me, I have a lot of stuff… ︎
- I have a wonderful 7,500-word chapter in which Hild goes to East Anglia and meets Fursey and Hereswith and at least two characters who will become very important in future books… ︎
- Almost everything I’ve ever written, published and unpublished, has sex scenes—that adds up to a lot of juicy stuff. And a lot of my poetry is… Well, let me just say I wouldn’t post it here. ︎
- I’m not sure sure what I’ll do if I’m wrong, if even those who can easily afford it choose not to. It might shake my faith a bit. ︎
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